We’re less than a week away from the launch of Creed: Rise to Glory, but developer Survios is only now revealing one of the game’s biggest features.

The boxing tie-in, which launches ahead of this year’s Creed II in cinemas, is getting an online multiplayer mode. More specifically, you’ll be able to enter the ring with total strangers and issue a royal beatdown in the middle of their face (or receive one if, like me, you don’t really know how boxing works). A Quick Match option will allow you to join up either with friends or with total strangers. Survios does absolutely recommend that your play space is entirely clear before you jump online, though.

This is a pretty big deal considering Creed’s main rival, Grab Games’ Knockout League, is a strictly single-player only affair (though it is getting a steady stream of new content). This could give the game some serious longevity. We’ve reached out to Survios to ask if multiplayer will support cross-player across the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR versions, which would definitely help the community thrive.

Outside of online we’ve always known that Creed will include a full single-player career mode in which you’ll climb your way through the boxing world as Adonis Creed, taking out champions and training with none other than Rocky Balboa. Fights are fuelled by Survios’ new Phantom Melee Technology, which aims to convincingly simulate aspects like fatigue in boxing matches. We think the game’s shaping up to be a contender.

Walmart and VR startup STRIVR are expanding a partnership and distributing Oculus Go headsets for worker training at every store.

The roll out should see 17,000 Oculus Go headsets distributed to Walmart stores for employee training — four going to every Supercenter and two heading to each Neighborhood Market or Discount Store before the year is out. The standalone VR headsets can be used with more than “45 activity-based modules” for training Walmart associates in “new technology, soft skills like empathy and customer service, and compliance.”

Walmart kicked off its program with STRIVR last year after the startup showed early adoption with athletic training through scenes captured from the real world and shown in a VR headset. A quarterback could get extra play repetitions without leaving the house and a skier could train for the Olympics without needing to be on the mountain.

With Walmart, the company pilot tested this summer training associates how to load the new “Pickup Tower” which allows customers to pick up online orders without interacting with another human being.

“VR is allowing associates to be trained before the towers are even installed – no teachers required,” a Walmart blog post reads. VR is said to boost “confidence and retention while improving test scores 10 to 15 percent,” according to Walmart’s Andy Trainor, who directs training.

The latest effort could introduce 1 million Walmart store workers to standalone virtual reality powered by Facebook. The 17,000 headsets, at roughly $200 each, is an investment of less than $3.5 million in hardware plus STRIVR’s training program. That isn’t exactly a large expense for an operation of Walmart’s scale, so if this project is successful we might see other companies following suit.

And if employees actually enjoy the training via VR headset? Facebook just showed workers at the largest employer and retailer in the United States why one might want to buy an Oculus VR headset. Come 2019 when a different class of standalone arrives capable of playing must-have games like Beat Saber and Superhot, Walmart might have a lot of employees ready to speak to customers from personal experience.

That’s certainly one way to get one billion people into VR I hadn’t considered before.

“Pixar originally didn’t want to do the project because they didn’t think we could hit the quality bar that they found acceptable,” said Ben Grossman, Co-Founder of Magnopus. “We had to prove ourselves.”

And they did just that. Magnopus is a visual effect and experience company founded by people that have decades of experience, awards, and creativity. The Google meta description for their website explains that they aim to “tell stories without borders” and the “What” page of the site states that they’re “creating the impossible by any means necessary.”

What better way to do that than with the immersive power of virtual reality?

Greatest Work

“All new employees at Magnopus are told that, regardless of the problem or how new they are, that they have the power to raise their hand and say that something isn’t good enough,” said Grossman.

From what I’ve heard in talking to people from Disney and Pixar, that’s very much along the lines of the same ideas those companies preach. Walt Disney himself once famously said, “Whatever you do, do it well,” and that feels like it’s ingrained into the DNA of not only Pixar and Disney as companies, but Magnopus as well. They may not be the household name that Pixar is, but it doesn’t mean that their work isn’t of award-worthy quality already.

In fact, Magnopus has already earned three different Emmy award nominations for its projects in the VR arena (Mission: ISS, Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab, and Coco VR) and it’s only a matter of time before one of them takes home the prize.

“Our secret sauce is all the projects that you haven’t seen,” said Alex Henning, another Co-Founder of Magnopus in an interview. “Being willing to iterate a lot and to try a lot of things early, to fail fast as it were and build up our knowledge as quickly as possible by tackling real world challenges.”

During our chat Grossman told me that “Magnopus” is a portmanteau of the Latin words for “greatest work” (Magnum Opus) and they’ve built their entire company around that mantra. And they’re focusing so heavily on VR because they see it as the future of entertainment — at least until something better comes along.

“We want to take people beyond the movie theater,” said Grossman. “We founded Magnopus right around when Oculus was getting out of Kickstarter and started out very quietly. We’ve stayed quiet. All the time people spend talking at conferences is time not spent actually pushing things forward. You could just go build it.”

Each of Magnopus’ three major VR projects to date (listed above) have been about not just replicating things you can see elsewhere, but rather putting you inside of an experience that transports you. Instead of re-enacting or watching a scene from the recent Blade Runner film, the Memory Lab experience gives you total freedom. Instead of walking through the land of the dead as Coco, you actually become one of the skeletons with full customization in a multiplayer sandbox environment. And Mission: ISS

The EV3 devkit features an improved battery life, better ergonomics, and an overall stronger design. In an official blog post made earlier today, Valve revealed its Knuckles EV3 devkit, the third iteration of the companies original 2016 design. A smaller upgrade when compared to the massive changes brought on by the EV2 model, this latest